


Agape

by honebami



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Aromantic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 06:05:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10893267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honebami/pseuds/honebami
Summary: Angie is loved by God.





	Agape

Paint ripples under Angie’s hands as God ghosts over her. Warm steel fingers link around and guide her loose wrists. She lets go and watches her body flicker and dance. Something is chiming in her, ringing and humming, and she doesn't need to think any more, not about the sun or the sea or what she is to be. She doesn't need to be at all any more, for God encases her now, God is protecting her, and Angie is loved by God.

Angie is different from others; she had thought so many times as she watched the love that curled in and around the cuffed hands that surrounded her. Clear blue rosebuds pushed up within her throat. She reached a hand out to the colour she saw, for but a moment, before pulling her fingers back and within. Angie is loved by God, she reminded herself, as she grazed light touches over the love blooming from her skin.

I love you too, sweetie, looped the tape through her mother's teeth. Again and again and again, and Angie would link her arms around her mother's warmth for what felt too short of a time before a hand would thump against her back. She'd pull herself off, unstick herself, and wonder what you would call a vampire who dies without sunlight. 

Angie could feel God within that light. She ran on bare feet over burnt-marshmallow sidewalk to find her sunny spot of soft earth. A safe sunbeam garden for her alone, where the grass flickered with heat. She curled her toes through and into the soil that compressed like warm chocolate cake beneath her feet. She stopped to salute the sun. The light burned against her moth-wing eyelids, but she held her reach, for she knew the sun loved her. Angie is loved by God, and God is within everything she is held by.

The angels she saw in picture books were divine and feminine, swathed in light and white. She thinks of them when she ties her smock, the white like the feathers of a filthy dove. Rather than an angel of guiding wings and snow-white love, she's an angel of pleated eyes and burning wheels; but any angel is a child of God, and so Angie, too, is loved by God.

Angie was kissed once. Not by the press of her mother's lips in her hair or the waves of a dog's tongue lapping against her skin, but by a blurred butterfly's landing upon her for but a moment before it fluttered back into a casual smile. As if nothing had happened, as if nothing was taken or expected of her. Angie knew what she had been painted to feel, a blossoming blood in the water, the blood of the storybook angels that peppered the frame of her vision. But rather than the warmth she was promised, the water was ice squeezed and stinging and draining through her fists. She laughed like a skipped stone. It wasn't her time to find it. It wasn't her time now, cocooned as she was, but she would. She would drink the indigo paint promised by the insect angels around her. She would find it on the ocean's horizon, the colour she saw shining and hot, the water that gave into cold clarity through her fingers.

Angie had yet to kiss that indigo ocean, but she was once in love with it, the way she was in love with dandelion puffs and glittering spiderwebs and charcoal dust. The rough bark of driftwood pressed into her thighs as she gazed out into that painted sea, pulling and pushing and shining and warm. She'd been warned not to go in, not without the guidance of larger hands, but her tiny toes in the wet sand led her forward into the froth.

The water was cold under the shining sun. She pressed on, for it was a beautiful dream, but the current pushed into her and the shore bed's rocks scraped the soles of her feet. She slipped on a smooth stone, and had but a moment to question where the hands were now before she hit the water's dyed surface and the ocean smashed her under. She burbled out glass bubbles as she thrashed and kicked, trying to scream or trying to cry or trying to die, until the hands of God hauled her out and up and dropped her upon the shore. She splattered like a soaked sock. As she shook on the toasted sand, numb to the calls of her name, Angie looked back at the thin trail of blood her sliced foot had left. It billowed and spread through the water like a poison. She wasn't meant to be in the sea. But Angie must, still, if by no one else, be encased, be protected, be loved, by God.

In the daze of her work, Angie grabs her water to take a sip. She sputters and laughs at the plastic taste, coughing on the painted fog. She wipes her mouth and traces her brush in a circle along the yogurt cup's dirtied walls to mark the water as not for her consumption. With a hum she returns to her painting. Her hand stills for a moment as she looks at the art of God, the art that had dripped from her own burning hands. 

An angel shimmering in light and white. Angie could have mistaken the painting for herself had the angel instead been painted in eyes and fire. An angel who lay smiling serenely, all alone, eyes closed to the water against her.

But Angie isn't alone, she thinks, for the arms of God are around and through her, warm as the sun, or a heated leather car seat, or forgotten milk tea through a faded mug that maybe wasn't so warm anymore. She couldn't feel her mother’s hands and the butterflies didn't reach the blossoms in her chrysalis skin but God was here; God was floundering; and the poisoned water pulls Angie under again, God bubbling up and out of her into someone real, someone alive. Her paint brush splatters red on the floor.

Angie was loved by God, and she will never feel unloved again.


End file.
